Teasing the Korean

Exactly.

Love this album. Thanks for hipping me to it, Larry!

Wow. He is on lots of Mancini albums. One of my all-time favorite intense moments in music is the final chord of the Peter Gunn theme. They hit a major 7 with a sharp 11, and the French Horns - including De Rosa - hit the 13th and slide up an octave, and Jack Sperling plays that final drum fill. It is orgasmic.

It's funny how different our ears are. I've known audiophiles who don't notice if an instrument is out of tune. You can be very sensitive to acoustics and room characteristics, but you can't tell the difference between a major and minor chord. On the other hand, I've known musicians with huge ears who would listen to scratchy records on cheap Pansonic bedroom stereos and be perfectly happy. Strange.

I lived in Boston for ten years, and worked in Harvard Square for much of that time. I used to try to swing by once a week. I would often leave with an armload of LPs for $25 or less. Just seeing the storefront in the piece linked above triggered a Pavlovian reaction. I still have dreams about that place. The dreams often include a secret back room where I could look at stock before it hit the bins. When I would bring albums home back in the day, I would typically peel off the price stickers, a move I came to regret, as stores have gone out of business. I still have a few albums with Stereo Jack's dollar price stickers, and I'm glad that I left them intact. Overall, I would rank Stereo Jack's as my favorite record store of all time, with Princeton Record Exchange being second. My rankings have an east-coast US bias, based on places I've lived. Jack, I don't know if you still post here, but congratulations on your retirement, and thanks for all the great music over the years! Now the big question: What happened to that sitar LP of 60s pop music that was perpetually at the front desk? I tried to buy it on multiple occasions, and was always told it wasn't for sale.

I will have to check these out. As I mentioned elsewhere, my mom worked with Perry circa late-1950s to mid-1960s. That said, I know very little of his stuff except for his Christmas albums. (My Mom is on the Season's Greetings album, circa 1959 or 60). I'm sure everyone here has seen the SCTV skit:

I have the box set of all five. I am very familiar with the first three, less so with the final two. Goldsmith's original is a classic and holds up very well as an album. It is readily available, but get the expanded version. The truncated album version had some puzzling omissions, for example the hunt music which is what everyone seems to remember. The second film was scored by Leonard Rosenman. Agree about the chorus and the "Hymn to the Bomb" track. The album version placed a "rock" drumbeat beneath, and I actually like the album version better! (The CD includes both the album and film tracks.) Anyway, these are perfect examples of the kinds of things I mentioned earlier.

Well, there's the Spaghetti Western Orchestra, and they are amazing!

Agreed, but it probably would be hard to do for a number of reasons. Lots of those scores have unusual ensemble configurations, and orchestras would have to hire extras. I'm not sure the audience for that kind of thing would justify the cost. Psycho gets performed, if for no other reason than it is all strings and doesn't require 10 percussionists. I think Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes - the original - has been performed also. Play Berg, Webern, or Schoenberg for the uninitiated, and they will tell you it's the soundtrack for a horror film.

Yup. As a devotee of mid-century modern design, I'm all about functional art. But film music works subliminally. All that background music that played on TV while I was playing with Matchbox cars and action figures left an indelible mark, and set me off on a path to buy as much of this stuff as possible. Just as some of us buy Mosaic box sets, others of us obsessively buy limited-edition releases of film scores from the 1950s to 1970s, myself included.

The place where people have been exposed en masse to 20th century modern classic music is film and television, roughly between 1950s and mid-1970s. Leonard Rosenman's 1955 score for The Cobweb is said to be the first Hollywood film score to use 12-tone techniques. (The Cobweb must also hold a record for film with the most utterances of the word "drapes."). Scores such as this continued through the 1960s and first half of the '70s with composers such as Jerry Goldsmith, Alex North, Jerry Fielding, and others. Star Wars ruined so many things culturally, not the least of which was Hollywood's approach to film scoring.

Contemporary language. People were speaking modern language back when modern art and modern music were being created.

We will agree to disagree. I think comparing modern art and modern music. is flawed on a number of levels, including how each is experienced in time.

The difference is you can do a quick breeze through a museum and decide where in the museum you want to spend the next two or three or five or six hours. You don't have that luxury when you buy a ticket to the symphony.

I'd love to go back in time and tell the engineer on Anatomy of a Murder to TURN UP THE BASS!

Not saying it's good or bad. I'm saying it's the reality of the respective situations.

Also, if someone pays an admission to go to a museum, they have the opportunity of looking at hundreds of pieces of visual art. You get a lot of bang for your buck. On the other hand, a ticket to a symphony likely costs more than a museum admission, and you get only two or maybe three works. If one of the works in "modern" in the true sense of the word, it will surely be paired with a crowd-pleaser for economic reasons. So by sheer numbers, spending two hours in a museum exposes you to a greater number of artworks than the same amount of time in a concert hall.

Yes.

"Static" in that it is a still image. It can be experienced quickly, slowly, or anything in between, however much time the viewer wants to put into it. A piece of music is experienced within the duration of a piece. Another reason I think the analogy is bad: Modern art tended to simplify, while modern "classical" music got more complex. Composers like Philip Glass and Morton Feldman are closer to much modern art in that regard, but I don't consider Glass or Feldman to be "modern" in the way that I use the term.

It's a poor comparison, because a piece of visual art is static. It can be viewed for seconds, minutes, hours. Music occurs in real time and must be experienced temporally.

Nora Orlandi!

Check out this 9-minute jazz quartet track from Un Amore.

I first became aware of Gaslini through his score for Antonioni's La Notte. I am now listening to his score for Un Amore, half of which is played by a jazz quartet with Gaslini on piano. Incredible stuff.